White Flag (DC) #2

Acrylic on canvas.

21x21x2"

The 20” x 20” acrylic painting operates within a reduced visual language, drawing from Varner’s classical training in fine art and art history while engaging—indirectly—with Jasper Johns’ white flag work (White House collection). Rather than reiterating iconography, Varner compresses it: the flag becomes surface, structure, and event.
Rendered in dense impasto, the work resists flatness. White pigment is built, displaced, and reformed into horizontal bands and raised forms that oscillate between painting and relief. Light activates the surface, producing subtle shifts that destabilize the work’s apparent minimalism.
Varner’s practice consistently moves between painting and object, collapsing distinctions between image and material. Here, gesture is restrained but not absent; tension accumulates through compression rather than expansion. The result is a work that reads as both resolved and provisional.
The first in this series recently sold at auction at the National Museum for Women in the Arts for JLW.